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Why Isn’t Google Being Investigated For Monopoly Abuse In The U.S?

Google is under investigation in Europe for monopoly abuse. Companies that overly dominate a business segment tend to do abuse their monopoly position and Google dominates in search engine access almost everywhere in the world.

What’s Google doing wrong? The European Commission (EC) thinks Google favors its own comparison shopping service in general search result pages which would inhibit a user from seeing actual relevant results to their search engine queries, which are replaced with those that favor Google’s own services.

The problem is this. Most people using Google for such searches would never know, but someone has been tracking results and according to them, Google has been stacking the search engine results in Google’s favor. The EC says Google’s search and advertising amount to an 80-percent marketshare in Europe and is abusing that position by imposing exclusivity and unfavorable upon advertisers who want to use, or may compete with the search engine giant’s services.

Years ago Microsoft was accused of monopoly abuse for similar reasons. Inhibiting competition from a monopoly position. Google is also being investigated in Europe regarding the Android operating system for smartphones and tablets; whereby marketshare exceeds 80-percent.

Why isn’t Google being investigated in the U.S?

Money.

That Google abuses its dominant position in search engine searches, search engine advertising, and internet advertising should not come as a surprise. Also not a surprise is that Google manages to infiltrate Washington politicians to an extent that Google’s tactics remain above the law.

As Kate MacKenzie pointed out earlier this week, Google has a dominant role in shaping and managing the internet and tens of millions of websites which depend upon search engine results and advertising to prosper. Google controls so much of the internet, via search engine results, that websites live or die based upon Google’s whims. Europe has caught on. Why hasn’t the U.S?

MacKenzie:

Google and partners insert so many tracking devices into ads on a webpage that readers have begun to revolt and now install ad blockers to prevent the tracking, speed up webpage downloads, and end the page clutter that permeates the majority of popular websites which rely on Google’s advertising.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. It gets worse.

Stats vary over time, but every popular Apple oriented website I checked has seen traffic drop over the past year… What do all these websites have in common?

Let me guess. Since Apple competes with Google on many fronts these days, websites that follow Apple and are critical of Google have had their traffic impacted by poor search results.

First, they’re all popular Apple oriented websites which usually are favorable to Apple’s products, including those that compete with Google’s products.

Second, each of those sites has, at one time or another, and collectively for many years, been critical to highly critical of Google’s policies, products, executives, and strategies.

Is it any wonder the European Commission has decided to go after Google’s practices? What about the U.S? As a technology company Google spends more on lobbying in Washington than any other company on planet earth. Twice that of Microsoft, four times that of Apple.

Google dominates the search engine and online advertising business with complete impunity thanks to millions of dollars poured into lobbying politicians.